Monday Tip – Stickibility – Now Is Not The Time To Give Up

Over the past few months I’ve heard lots of people start to get very disillusioned with Internet Marketing. Rampaging Panda’s, Google Slaps, Customers who think that it’s acceptable to ask for a refund no matter how much they like the product. (Hi Mark Loved the product, but I’m not going to have time to do anything for a few weeks as I am going on Vacation so can I have a refund… yes seriously I got an email like that!).

I’ve heard people say “Internet marketing is just a scam, the only people who make money are the guru’s ” There are a whole lot of reasons why people are getting disillusioned. But let me tell you something this is not new!

5 years or so ago I had about 200 sites that were earning me $5000 a month de-indexed from google overnight One day I was earning $170 from Adsense the next I was lucky to get $17 (Thanks Yahoo!)Yet 5 years later I am still here and earning much more why?

Because I simply refused to give up!

Have you ever watched the Shawshank Redemption, It took Andy (Tim Robbins) 19 years to dig the tunnel with a small rock hammer. Me, I am more practical I’l use a sledgehammer and keep hitting that wall until it comes down.

Internet marketing is a wall a big thick wall that often seems impenetrable , you just need to keep pounding away until you break throughout keep working at it and it’s impossible to fail. Keep pounding away day after day and You will succeed , it’s impossible not to. It’s like having 5 dice and trying to throw 5 sixes, you might get it on the first throw or the tenth or maybe the one thousandth…but sooner or later you will get it if you stick at it.

Here is an example of how I failed and stuck at it even when I was despairing of ever making sales or even giving away stuff for free!

I’ve sold some products via The warrior special offer forum in the past 2 years.

The first I gave away for free (big mistake btw!) I gave away about 20 copies…. Failure But I didn’t give up

The second I gave away for free again (Didn’t learn my lesson) I gave away 40 still a failure But I didn’t give up.

The 3rd I sold 114 copies and made over $1000. Not so much of a failure this time. I’d learned from the last 2 (this was actually a repackaged version of the 2nd wso i’d done)

The 4th I sold 463 copies. I added to this from what I learned from the previous 3 WSO’s

The 5th that I launch just over a week ago has so far sold over 640 copies (List building Debunked )
EDIT: SEO Debunked the follow up to list building debunked sold over 1000 copies!

It’s the same with whatever I try, for example email marketing when I started using email to market I struggled to make any money from my lists, but as time went on and I saw what didn’t work I started to zero in on what did work, after a while emails that might have earned me $50 were suddenly earning me $500. I’ll never stop learning because i’ll never give up.

Try to keep learning and constantly improving what you do, model yourself on other marketers and try to improve on what they do.

The key to being successful in Internet Marketing is often not to go and buy everything marketers try to sell you, (Hey guys look ..Mark’s committing IM suicide!) But to watch at how they try to sell it to you, this will often be more valuable than the product.

If you find they do it in a way that you don’t like then don’t do it like that, if you like how they do it then see if you can use that method on your sites. very often methods used in selling products will work well on your own websites.

If your site suddenly drops from ranking 3rd in google to 303rd don’t sit there telling the world google hates you (they probably do BTW!) go and look what is now in 3rd place what has that site got that yours doesn’t what are they doing differently.

Don’t give up, success might just be around the corner

Let me have your comments, I would love to hear about your successes and failures or how you turned failure into success, it will help someone keep on track.

37 comments

Very, very good post. I have two sites that sell ebooks on niches fairly consistently. That’s all profit as the sites get natural traffic. My challenge is bringing on the other 10 niche sites I have that don’t get enough traffic. Plus we’re trying to get an Amazon Affiliate site making money….

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Hey Mark
Great post, I feel that business online is very near to business off line except the swings up or down seem to be more dramatic.

As with my offline business you have to adopt a thought process of, this will work. The person or business with the most flexibility normally comes off best in life. i know this is easy to say than do, and I admit for me the last 3 months have been tough, with googles personality disorder.

However as you say you have to learn brush yourself down and get on with it-or give up

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Totally agree! I came to realize that it’s completely natural for most of people to fail. There’s been insane number of books written and words said about the reasons why people fail and what’s needed in order to succeed.

Obviously, the reasons are not in google’s updates, or similar stuff. Only those get disillusioned who had illusions about IM as the way to cash in fast & easy.

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I always enjoy your posts. What keeps me hanging on is my crappy day job. I’ve been there for a long time and although it used to be an ok place, it sucks more and more every day due to the economic situation. So I keep plugging away on here. I am convinced my efforts will someday provide me with a good consistant income so I can walk away from that lousy situation. I’m 61 and the traditional idea of retirement keeps going further way like a carrot in front of a donkey. There’s talk of raising retirement age!
I enjoy this even though I haven’t made much money yet, I will.

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This is a very good post for those who is feeling frustrated, IM is really a big field to learn, and I learn the lesson hard “keep buying every wso or im product from time to time”. I earn nothing only after I focus on single method rather than jumping from CPA to Affiliate, from CJ to Amazon.

That’s too tempting in the IM world when you heard something like “the secret has been decoded”..”the secret has been disclosed”……

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Great advice, I have been trying and failing for the last 10 years to make it online. My family and friends think I am crazy to keep plugging away. But even after all this time, and trust me when I say thousands in credit card debt, I just can’t give up. I must have taught stubborn to the “mule”!!!!

Just recently I have actually earned $0.59 with Adsense, and $0.88 with Amazon, which tells me that this does work, so I’ll be putting all my focus on these two sites until they are earning well before I move on and revamp my other existing sites.

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Thanks Mark …actually that was just what I needed this Monday morning! I’ve been trying to make money online for nearly 2 years ..it certainly has it’s ups and downs! well ..actually main downs in my case! But yes it is about persistance…like Darryl above …I need to escape my job and soon ..the current economic climate makes people feel trapped and my employers are exploiting that with employees and what was once a nice place to work is now anything but. I hate all the get-rich type products that are still pitched at me every day …internet marketing takes time, I’ve spent most evenings and weekends sat at the PC working this stuff out and making all the mistakes. But yes Mark if I keep hitting at it for long enough I will have my breakthrough! You’re one of the good guys out there ..keep up the good work!

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Hi Mark
My reason for IM failure is that I have not treated IM as a real business. I have not invested real time and money into it. Always cut corners, looked for easy options, free ways…
Success has come to me only after 2 long years!!

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Much like a snowflake that is very small, yet it you find a way to pack enough of them together into a snowball and then roll that around in the snow it grows quickly because as the surface area becomes larger it can attract more and more snow on each roll.

Start with something small, refine it and use that exposure to build a bigger brand with a wider reach each time.

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Its very easy to get disillusioned with IM since there is so much to learn and so many distractions – but you are right – you’ve got to stick with it, persistance is the key.

Personally, I am in IM for the long haul, learning as I go. While I wish success would come a little quicker – I still appreciate what I have learned so far and constantly remind myself with each passing week that I’ve learned something new that I didn’t know the week before. The more you actually do – the more you will learn and you will find success. We can also depend on you to lead the way – keep up the good work, you certainly inspire me to keep going – so thank you for that

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I really needed the positive words today. I ran a successful ecommerce site that I took to the top of google by learning and applying SEO and enjoyed it so much that I have opened a business to get that benefit to other business owners. Since its not something people search for often ( since they don’t know they need it!) it seems to do best with personal contact. But with both my sales people sick I have fallen behind and so had my attitude! Thanks for the pick-me-up!

If any other frustrated IMer out there would like to help local and online businesses succeed on the Internet or have a mechanism to capture leads, I would love someone to collaborate with! It might help both of us – strength in numbers! Send me an email and we can talk.

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For me this is really timely. Not that I’m thinking of giving up but sometimes you seem almost no nearer Success than when you started. The last few months have earned me in Adsense £2.26, £2.94 and 6.93. And I’ve just now woken up to what it is I’m really meant to be doing. I remember hearing a now fairly successful marketer say that in his first four and a half years online he didn’t make a bean.

So it’s very good to hear marketers who are at your stage comment as you did. I reckon I’m a couple of months to getting to my tipping point. But I can’t know; maybe it’ll be two and a half months.

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Secondly it raised my spirit more than it already is as I inadvertently already use your I.M philosophy. More than that I have been online 5 years and only recently have I started to make any real money. This is down to not trying so hard and working what I already know on a daily basis.

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Thanks for this because like others have said this is very timely! Oh, I’m not going to give up (too darn stubborn for that), but I DO get down at times! I have over 30 sites and none of them are making any money (just pennies here and there). 2 of those 30 sites are sitting on page 2 of Google, so I have decided to put ALL of my efforts into those 2 sites until they get to the 1st page. And then I will pick 2 more sites to get to the 1st page and continue like this until I have all 30 sites on the 1st page! I now think this is a sound plan…

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what you explain is exactly how i go about my internet business as well

keep plodding on and keep on doing

we all have bad days but 1 thing i always do and this works for everyone, is when you look at your business and realize that your not where you want to be, take a massive step back and look at your business in the bigger picture

you have loads and loads more time to get where you want to be with your business and as long as you dont give up you will get there

we all put pressure on our selves trying to hit those targets and goals within weeks and months but looking at it all in the bigger picture you will realize that you have plenty of time

at the same time of course dont waste time just keep taking action

im very stubborn and im like a steam roller so thats prob why ive stuck at it and started to see some good results 🙂

thanks for the post mark and well done on your 600+ sales on your list building debunked

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I think the flip side to this that also causes a lot of people to get disillusioned is that refusing to give up doesn’t mean you keep doing the same thing until it works.

If you’d stuck with those 200 Adsense sites, trying to get them reindexed and constantly updating them to try to stay ahead of the latest Google changes, I doubt you would be where you are today.

I see far too many people who keep banging their head against the same wall instead of trying something different. Sometimes you need to give up on a particular strategy or business model, but that doesn’t mean you’re giving up on internet marketing.

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Too often one gives up just before the ‘wall comes down’ – heavens knows that when we built our brick and mortar business, we had lots of failures – and more successes.
This is a real business and you must treat as such; so we get up every day are work at our business. Sometimes we get our toes stepped on during the ‘dance with Google’, but somehow IM is still building. Yes, there are times when we regroup or rethink a site, but never does it cross our minds to stop or to give up. This is the way to find freedom, once again.

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I’ve been online for quite a while and I’ve gone through the wringer, so to speak! 🙂 You know, trapped by the information overload problem, by the next shiny object syndrome. . . you name it! Anyhow, I’m still here. . . .

I have one Amazon Affiliate Site that’s bringing in a little cash on auitopilot – if I had 20 such sites, I’d be sitting pretty! At the moment, as I’m a writer, I’m experimenting with writing PLR, and have launched a PLR site. i plan to make this a second income stream.

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We have spent the last 2 years trying to “do it ALL, do it ALL at once, and do it ALL right Now!

The end result was that I have felt like a one-legged woman without a shoe in an ass-kicking contest.

We haven’t had any sites de-listed, but we have had other challenges, losses in revenue from having articles stolen and removed, learning curves that keep us failing forward, software and hardware problems, . . . blah, blah, . . .

My husband and I own and operate this business by ourselves and some of our disagreements have caused some major meltdowns between us. Thankfully, we have resolved those. There are good days and hard days, but I cannot imagine doing anything else, either!

I only wish we had started this 14 years ago! I am on a tax and bookkeeping hiatus right now to get our paperwork caught up until the 15th of this month, then back at it full force – Your message is so timely! Stopping for taxes had me feeling very discouraged.

Thank you for the much needed reminder to stick with it, because, believe me, I was definitely beginning to feel like the bug instead of the windshield!

I lost ranking on several of our sites, but wrote some timely content, sent out tweets on them, increased linking to those sites, pinged them, sent links via other social media and email, looked at and began some testing that wasn’t in place before, modified some tags on articles, modified some titles, headings and sub-headings, and some old content and SHAZAAM, nearly all are back on pages 1& 2! Persistence is truly key!

Your inspirational message is hugely appreciated by both Johnny and I! Keep up the good work! We are sticking with it! FOR SURE!

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Very timely article Mark as I’m about to cash in my chips. I’ve been studying and researching IM for over a year now. Prior to that, I’ve had a wedding services website for years that has been somewhat successful and consistently at the top of page 2 of Google under the very popular search term “Lake Tahoe weddings”. This is without much promoting of it.

Applying what I’ve learned about article marketing, I decided to experiment with my site and promote it to hopefully get it to the first page of Google. I spent over a month writing 25 quality articles and submitted them to Ezine. Last week I checked my rankings and moved down to the third page.

Without articles I’m on page 2 for years…with articles I move downward. How do you figure? I surely do want to quit after this disappointment.

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One more thing – I had my Google Adsense stripped from me for having a 200% increase in traffic. I resolved it by writing email and begging and groveling and providing research, and I got my adsense BACK. They “Gurus’ tell you to only write 1 email if it happens to you – B/S – I wrote 3 email – every time they rejected me I sent another. Persistence, diligence, research, hard work – All that plus some begging and pleading and some humble whining paid off!

File DEC complaints against people and sites for stealing your content and work – It takes about 10 minutes and if you ever need to prove your sincerity to Google it helps a lot!

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Great post & very inspiring. I’m glad that I’m not the only person that wants to give up sometimes, as I’ve been very near to doing just that – but I always remind myself of how much I’ve learn’t about IM, and how much I enjoy the different processes of setting up a website, writing content, link building etc. and I’d never want to stop doing that!

There is so much to learn about IM, that sometimes I’m not sure which road to take that will start earning some money. But I’m definately going to keep plugging away. Thanks Mark, for keeping me on track.

It is possible to make $3000 in a few months if you hit on the right forumula and stick to it and don’t jump from project to project without seeing it through

When i started I worked 16 hours a day for about 3 months after 4 months I was making $4,000 a month so I do know it is possible. I started with less available money and less knowledge that 95% of people reading this.

I had 2 things time and belief

$3000 a month is $100 a day If you break that down further thats just 20 people buying a $5 product. Believe me selling a $5 product is much easier than selling a $100 product.

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I have been at it (IM that is) for 5 going on 6 years now and while I have made some money along the way it was not until this year that I started making regular income from a couple of my sites. That continues to grow thankfully and I work on what works while keeping an eye on future developments to my business.

At the same time that I saw that happening I ditched 8, yes 8, sites that I had poured blood sweat and tears into with very little to show for it. The first one was hard to let go but really…why keep flogging a dead horse? Stoooopid eh?

Talking of horses, that is my background and anyone who has tried riding knows for a certainty you are going to fall off. You just have to climb back on and you will be a better rider in the long run.

You won’t need too much luck if you just stick at it and when someone tells you how lucky you are in a few years time you had better practice a good eye rolling technique!

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Hey, Mark, I’m on vacation ~ can I have a refund on all the stuff I ever bought from you? pretty please? with sugar on top? (I’m kidding, by the way ~ but the you knew that didn’t you 😉

Funny you should use the Shawshank Redemption as an example ~ I’ve used that novella and video in my classes for years ~ I’m a big fan, and I think my favorite line in the movie is this: “Hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”